Three years into my first business, I spent an entire weekend trying to figure out something that should have taken five minutes: what percentage of our leads came from referrals versus cold outreach. I couldn't answer it. Not because I forgot, but because we'd never consistently captured it.
This happens more than I'd like to admit. There are metrics that seem trivial when you're small—just noise—and then they become the foundation of every major decision two years later. For us, it was lead source. For others I've talked to, it's response time to inbound inquiries, or simply whether a customer actually used the product they paid for.
The annoying part is you rarely know what's important until the window to collect it has closed. You can't go back and ask last year's customers how they found you.
I've started treating every new project differently now: assume you'll eventually want to know everything, and build the simplest possible way to capture it from day one. It's a bit paranoid. But I'd rather over-instrument early than spend a Sunday rebuilding history from memory.
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